Sometimes it's slow and sometimes it's sudden, sometimes they're young and sometimes they're old, but at some point in your life you'll experience a loss that'll change you forever.

I, myself, lost my mother. She was young and I was too young. It wasn't sudden but it felt so sudden. She fought so hard and she lost her battle when I was ten years old, leaving behind my two siblings and I and shaping each of our lives forever and so differently.

And that wasn't the end of our great losses. We lost a tremendously important aunt just two years later, that time being so quick yet slow almost yet again. We carried on twelve years later to suddenly lose our grandmother, our mother's mother, whom carried a large role in raising us after the fact. Although she was elder, it didn't seem right. It just wasn't her time. It wasn't any of their time, not for us it wasn't.

It wasn't until her coming up birthday this year after she'd passed that I stopped wishing they were all here. I song came on the radio reminding me of my mama, it sang "so I'll sing Hallelujah you were an angel in the shape of mom." In those seconds of that song I knew they were all angels. They were angels here and they must be angels there. Her birthday came and I woke up thinking I hope you're dancing in the sky. I hope my mama, my aunt, my nana and every other great loss that has come and gone is dancing in the sky.

Sometimes we lose friends, sometimes family but a great loss is just that, a great loss.

It's true what they say "people will grieve for years, if not forever." It comes in many forms and it shapes us. New grief reminds us of old grief, continuing to carve us into different, hopefully kinder and better, creatures.

I'll always feel a pain where they're supposed to be in my life. As the years pass I'll always think of them and the beautiful humans they were, but now I only hope they're dancing in the sky.